21 April 2007

Digitally signed mails considered unreliable

After six month of usage I finally stopped digitally signing my outgoingE-Mails (I was using a notary-supported Thawte certificate).

What sounds like a bright idea proved to be unreliable in practice: Several largecorporations (I won't name them here) refuse to accept signed mails (a quote: signatures are untrustworthy), some of them even did not notify the sender.

In my humble opinion these corporations have a false sense of security -signed E-Mails really provide authentication. But: At least four of my clientsrefuse to accept signed mails - I constantly had to switch between signed and unsigned mode, what a hassle!